The USA (8 Nov. 2016) presidential election was won by Donald J.
Trump (Republican party).
This table shows the preliminary (as of 3 Dec; all figures are expected to change slightly
as further vote-counting occurs, and the electoral college will meet on 19 Dec.)
official election results.

The above table also shows, in the rightmost columns,
the percentages of voters in those states who chose
the Libertarian Party's candidate Gary Johnson
and the Green Party's Jill Stein. (Stein was not on ballot in Nevada.)

In most other countries, there is only
(what the USA calls) the "popular vote" –
they just call it the "vote."
Under those rules Hillary Clinton
would have won by about 2.9 million votes.
But in the USA, the candidates win individual states,
and then those states
contribute various integer numbers of electoral votes, then whoever
gets a majority of those wins. Hence Trump won.
If nobody has a majority, the House
of Representatives decides the election.

If fewer than 50K votes had switched Trump→Clinton in the crucial states,
then she would have won, even if meanwhile tens of millions of votes
were switched Clinton→Trump in irrelevant states.

Somewhat over 90% of the time, historically,
the popular and electoral winners have agreed,
but not in 2016.
The other candidates who won the USA popular vote but lost the
election thanks
to the "electoral college" and/or House were:
Andrew Jackson in 1824,
Samuel Tilden in 1876,
Grover Cleveland in 1888,
and Al Gore in 2000.

It is worth briefly revisiting that historical roll to
point out a remarkable thing:
Donald Trump's was by far the greatest ever popular vote loss
by a presidential winner.
The table explains what we mean by that.

Year

Candidate A

Candidate B

A-B pop. vote margin

B-A electoral vote margin

2016

H.R.Clinton

D.J.Trump

2.9 million=2.1%

306-232=74=13.75%

1876

S.J.Tilden

R.B.Hayes

252666=1.0%

185-184=1=0.27%

2000

Al Gore

G.W.Bush

543816=0.5%

271-266=5=0.93%

1888

Grover Cleveland

Benj.Harrison

94530=0.9%

233-168=65=16.2%

In this table, "A" is the popular vote winner, while
"B" is the electoral vote winner (hence elected president).
The only election that approaches challenging the
supremacy of Trump-Clinton 2016, is Hayes-Tilden 1876
which was fraudulent! The story of how that came about is
described in many history books, but let us merely quote

There is no longer any doubt that this election [1876] was "stolen."
– Samuel E. Morison, The Oxford History of the
American People (Oxford Univ. Press 1965) p.734.

There is also one more election, 1824, that belongs on this list
as a special case.
Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote (to the
partial extent that the popular vote was even
counted at that time; 6 states did not count it)
and the electoral vote, but still lost the Presidency to
J.Q.Adams due to the intercession of the House of Representatives.
This was the only time in US history that nobody got an electoral vote majority,
unless you count 1800 where Jefferson & Burr were initially tied.
(Jackson could have clinched a win by getting 131 electoral votes,
but only got 99 hence this election was decided by the House.
Clay, who was Speaker of the House, threw his support to
Adams. Crawford had suffered a paralyzing stroke
that put him out of contention, and to the extent
he had an effect, he tended to
split the House vote with Jackson.)

Both the 1876 and 1824 elections
were regarded far and wide as travesties and had very thunderous
and damaging historical repercussions. In particular, the price
the Republicans agreed to pay to get the Democrats to accede
to the corrupt inter-party
bargain solidifying Hayes' fraudulent 1876 election
was basically to cease enforcing legal rights for blacks and to
open the floodgates to "Jim Crow" oppression over the next 90
or so years.

Jackson regarded Clay↔Adams as having
made a "corrupt bargain" to undemocratically
deny him the presidency and also blamed
the death of his wife on slanders by his political opponents.
As a result when Jackson did become President 1829-1837
he had the attitude that anything he did to gain power, regardless of
the rest of the government, was OK. He was a total slash-and-burn
maniac, starting the so-called "spoils system"
whose corrupt tendencies took over the US government, to a
too-large degree, from then on; and presiding
over the Cherokee "trail of tears" genocide in defiance of a Supreme Court
ruling.

Trump's electoral college margin
in 2016 ranked 46th-from-top (percentagewise)
out of the 58 USA presidential elections
according to
data compiled by
Prof. John Pitney,
while his popular vote loss
was by far the largest among all Presidents. Trump described this as

I mean, think of it.
We won in a landslide. That was a landslide.
And we didn't have the press. The press was brutal.
You know what? Hey.
–
Donald J. Trump
speaking
in Cincinnati Ohio, 1 Dec. 2016,
at the first of 10 planned post-election "victory rallies."

As of the date of this writing (Nov. 2016)
I certainly do not know. Some prominent computer security and voting
experts – e.g. J.Alex Halderman, Philip Stark, Ron
Rivest,
and Barbara Simons
– claimed, due to circumstantial evidence, that this was
a likely-enough possibility that "forensic audits" ought
to be conducted in those states;
and urged the Clinton team to demand them.
Their evidence mainly consisted of

A claim that the parts of Wisconsin using "computerized
voting machines" gave Trump about 7% more votes.

See also:
this report by Richard Hayes Phillips
pointing out more suspicious facts about Wisconsin's numbers, for
example he lists 7 towns in WI with turnouts exceeding 100%...
A 59% majority of the vote-counting
machines in Michigan's most-Democratic area,
namely 87 optical scanners, broke on election
day [Chad Livengood & Joel Kurth:
Half of Detroit votes may be ineligible for recount,
The Detroit News 6 Dec. 2016], causing
392 of the 662 Detroit precincts to announce
(what the state later admitted were)
incorrect ballot totals, i.e. with
the number of voters disagreeing with the number of votes.
Daniel Baxter, the elections director for the city of Detroit,
blamed aging equipment and summed up the situation with "It's not good."
... Michigan then claimed it was illegal for
those 392 precincts to be recounted!

The fact many US
intelligence agencies had announced they believed Russia had tried
to influence the election by cyber methods, including
breaking into both the RNC and DNC computers and email systems,
and (separately) Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta's emails,
which they then leaked to the public.
They also broke into voter registration databases in at least
two states
(Illinois and Arizona) to steal voter data,
and tried to do so in at least 20 states.
This was according to several US intelligence
sources speaking to the press anonymously, as well as FBI director James Comey.
A large number of US intelligence agencies came to the "high confidence" conclusion
the actor behind this was Russia. Then the CIA (and according to leaks
to the Washington Post
in mid-December, also later the FBI) further concluded this was directed by Putin
and/or the "highest levels of the Russian government" and with the goal
of electing Trump.
Reuters (15 Dec 2016) then disclosed
U.S. election agency breached by hackers after November vote and the hacker was
Russian-speaking.
Incidentally, US intelligence as of 2016
believed Putin was the world's richest
man ($85 billion) as a result of massive
"kleptocracy" of Russian state assets.
(His official salary, in contrast,
was below $200K.) There also seemed little doubt
Putin had had many of his opponents murdered.

The fact the pre-election polls seemed to be systematically more
pro-Clinton and anti-Trump than the official vote totals.

Even Halderman said that he thought this evidence was weak – e.g.
he felt a priori it was more likely
there had been no hacking – but these experts
felt that the net impact of this
evidence was great enough to justify auditing.
As
Halderman
put it:
"I don't believe that either one of these seemingly
unlikely explanations [hacked election or just
an innocent Trump-favoring fluctuation]
is overwhelmingly more likely than the other."

Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, then announced
that she was going to pay for recounts in Wisconsin,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania, (and perhaps Ohio?), and
raised over $4 million in 1 day to pay for it!
Her total fundraising effort was planned to be about $8 million.
(That 1-day fundraise was actually more money than she earlier had
raised to fund her entire presidential campaign.)

Donald Trump had some peculiar reactions to this.
First, he called Stein's recount effort a "scam" and "ridiculous,"
e.g. "This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has
already been conceded, and the results of this election should be
respected instead of being challenged and abused" (25 Nov).
He indeed then filed at least one
objection
and one
lawsuit
seeking to block it; and then Federal and Michigan State courts
simultaneously
announced
conflicting rulings that Michigan should and should not recount
(causing both sides to declare victory, and total confusion).
Second, on 27 Nov, Trump claimed that not only did he
win "the Electoral College in a landslide, I won
the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted
illegally."
He shortly thereafter added:
"Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California
– so why isn't the media reporting on this?
Serious bias – big problem!"

My reactions to Trump's claims are mixed.
On the one hand, I feel we should take him seriously since he is
the president-elect and has access to far more vote data
and expertise than I. Indeed he by now
must be one of the top few experts in the USA.
On the other hand, Trump provided zero evidence for these claims,
and note the documented fact that
70% of whatever Trump says that journalists check
turns out to be "mostly false"
or worse, with over half being 4-Pinocchio lies.

And, oddly enough, as of 1 Dec. 2016,
there have been exactly
4 cases of voters casting fraudulent
votes in the 2016 election reported in the press
– and all four were registered Republicans:

Terri Lynn Rote first early-voted Trump,
then voted again at a different polling site in
Des Moines Iowa. She was arrested on 27 Oct.
This was "the first time in 12 years that
Polk County Auditor Jamie Fitzgerald
can remember ever having to report potential voter fraud."
[Charly Haley: Voter
fraud suspect arrested in Des Moines,
Des Moines Register 29 Oct 2016].
Rote told Iowa Public Radio that she did it because
she was afraid her first ballot for Trump would be changed to
Hillary Clinton, because "the polls are rigged."
She could be imprisoned for up to 5 years.

Phillip Cook was arrested
on Election Day after voting twice in
Sugar Land, Texas.
He claimed to be an employee of Trump's campaign who
was "testing the security of the electoral system."
But the Trump campaign denied that.

Audrey Cook was a Republican election judge in
Alton Illinois, who was charged on 4 Nov. with double voting.
She told the Associated Press
she'd filled out absentee ballots for both herself and her dead
husband Vic
because she knew he would want Donald Trump to be president.
[Alton
election judge charged for allegedly casting ballot for dead husband,
Associated Press, 4 Nov 2016].

Gladys Coego was hired to open absentee ballots in Miami-Dade County.
One of her co-workers noticed that she was going a step further,
filling in the bubble for mayoral candidate
Raquel Regalado (R) with a pen she
had in her purse. She was caught in the act and arrested.
[Patricia Mazzei:
Two
women busted for election fraud in Miami-Dade,
Miami Herald 28 Oct. 2016].

In any event, as of the present writing, neither Stein nor Clinton
has made any claim that the election was fraudulent or hacked.
But Trump did. Indeed, for Trump's claim to be correct,
there must have been at least about 4.5 million illegal voters, if they
voted 80:20 for Clinton over Trump.
If all were caught and imprisoned, that would more
than double the USA's prison population, and exceed the number of
illegal-voting convictions in all previous US history, combined,
by a factor of order 1000.

So to summarize:
(i) Stein has called for a recount,
(ii) prominent computer scientists
and fraud experts have called for a forensic audit,
(iii) Clinton has agreed to provide support
to help Stein's effort, and
(iv) Trump has denounced the official election results as
enormously fraudulent.
So there would seem to be unanimous agreement recounts
and forensic audits are somewhere between "good ideas" and "absolutely necessary."
Unfortunately I have doubts Stein will be able to cause a genuine forensic audit,
as opposed to a mere garden variety recount.

Update mid-December 2016:
Stein succeeded in causing a recount in Wisconsin, which changed its totals
by less than 1000 votes (e.g. its Trump-Clinton margin widened by 162)
and did not appear to have any "forensic" component.
Her attempts to recount Pennsylvania or to have experts examine its
voting machines for "hacks" both were blocked.
In Michigan, the closest state, Trump supposedly beat Clinton by
10704 votes out of 4.8 million cast. A recount began but was aborted
by court order. But 75335 votes were cast but never counted
by Michigan's
optical-scan machines. Many of these votes could have been counted
by humans, e.g. because they had been filled out in red ink
unreadable by the machines, or using "X" marks or
☑ symbols instead of filled-in-circles. And Stein provided the
money to do it. But they remained uncounted by order of courts
and/or Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette.
Most of these uncounted votes occurred in Detroit
and Flint, two Clinton strongholds.
Also note, any precinct where the number of ballots differed from
the number of voters
(e.g. 392 of the 662 Detroit precincts!)
was forbidden to recount, and
any precinct where seals on voting machines were broken, ditto.
This is the exact opposite of what any "forensic audit" would do,
and a dream come true for any fraudster.

In any case,
for the purposes of the rest of this page,
we are going to take the attitude
that the election results were legitimate.
(And if the result really were fraudulent due to
fairly small alterations in "swing states,"
that would not affect the validity
of almost all we shall say.)

There also was a
considerably less publicized
3-part debate between Jill Stein and Gary Johnson,
organized by Tavis Smiley.
Its first two parts were
televised by PBS and all three were made available
over the internet
I,
II,
III.

Date

Location

Moderator

Winner (Polls, but online "polls"
allowing anybody to vote as many times as they want, not included.
You are warned that "debate-watchers" are a self-selected,
and not a random-uniformly selected,
subset of "all people.")

26 September

Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.

Anderson Cooper.
84M viewers.

Clinton by 62-27 in CNN/ORC telephone poll of 521 debate watchers
conducted immediately after; and by 51-40 in a PPP poll of 1002
pre-agreeing watchers; and by
57-30 in a YouGov
survey questioning
1154 US adults who watched it.

9 October

Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York.

Lester Holt.
66M viewers.

Clinton by 57-34 in CNN/ORC telephone poll.
Also by 47-22 in a YouGov poll
interviewing 812
registered voters who watched debate;
and 42-28 in a Politico/MorningConsult
poll released 11 Oct.

19 October

University of Nevada, Las Vegas Nevada.

Chris Wallace.
72M viewers.

Clinton by 52-39 in CNN/ORC telephone poll of 547 debate watchers.
Also 49-39 in a YouGov
poll
interviewing 1503
registered voters who watched debate, and the exact same 49-39 result
was found in an independent
CBS battleground-state
poll
interviewing 943 over internet.

1 November

Los Angeles, California.

Tavis Smiley.
(1M viewers?)

No poll done to assess any "winner."
But in my subjective opinion, Johnson
performed better than
any of the three performances by Trump.
Watch and judge for yourself.

The CoPD is an inherently corrupt body since it
is a corporation created jointly by the Democratic and Republican
Parties, not an independent body owned by the media.
These two parties, not
the media or a public interest
group such as the League of Women Voters, make the rules,
and in particular
those rules always make sure that no third-party candidate is
allowed to debate, unless both happen to want him to that year.
If any third-party candidate
shows up at the debate site, even with a legally purchased ticket,
the Republican and Democratic parties have so far, every time,
gotten armed
thugs (oh sorry, I meant police) to escort him/her offsite
to block his/her attendance.

For example, after that happened to presidential candidate
Ralph Nader in 2000, he sued,
and the suit was settled in April 2002 with the CoPD paying him an
"undisclosed amount of money" and issuing a hilarious
letter of apology to him.
It explained that the CoPD had misunderstood Nader's intentions
and if they'd realized he merely intended to use his ticket to
attend (the way he said he would to the arresting officers)
they would have been happy to help in any way they could!
Why was it that no other
ticket-holding attendee of the debate was arrested,
and no other had
their intentions misunderstood? The letter did not say.

Did that experience cause the CoPD to cease these
practices?
No. In 2012, Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential
candidate, and her vice-presidential candidate Cheri Honkala,
were arrested by police
as they attempted to enter the grounds of the
presidential debate site at Hofstra University, then
both were detained for eight hours handcuffed to chairs
in a warehouse, guarded by 13 police,
with no phone call allowed, then finally
spirited away in a Secret Service car.
In 2016 essentially the same thing happened.
(Oddly enough, no charges were filed against Stein or Nader.
They were just arrested, not charged.)

Note that Clinton won all three debates by large margins, although
Trump improved relative to her each time. (By
extrapolating the improvements, presumably Trump would have first won
a hypothetical 5th debate?)

Trump described these as
"I won every poll [about the first] Presidential Debate –
except for the little watched @CNN poll" [tweeted 27 Sep.]
and he "Won every poll. Virtually every poll."
[told to his supporters later that same day];
and he also won
"the second debate in a landslide (every poll)" [tweeted 11 Oct.]
and finally Trump told Bill O'Reilly on Fox News (Oct.27) that he had
"won the third debate easily" and all the online polls
had him winning, but then "dirty polls" came out showing him
"losing by numbers that were ridiculous" which was since
pollsters are engaged in "suppression" and "tremendous dishonesty."

In addition to the debates we just tabulated,
there also were 12
debates between the Republican primary contenders
only, and 9 between the Democrats only.

The 9 Democratic debates were watched by an estimated
4.5 to 15.8 million viewers each, averaging 8M.
The 12 Republican debates had 11 to 24 million viewers
each, averaging 15.5M.
Impressively, even the least-watched
Republican debate got more viewers than
8 among the 9 Democratic debates!
This was despite the facts that in 2016 more
Amercians identified as Democrats than Republicans
(Dem=35%, Rep=28% according to Pew;
Dem=29%, Rep=26% according to Gallup)
and the Democrats had fewer debates, both of which would
naively be expected to get them more viewers.

Why this viewership discrepancy?
The Democratic debate schedule appeared to have
been chosen either by somebody tremendously
more idiotic than whoever scheduled the
Republican debates –
or actually
with the intent of causing low viewership.
It was widely speculated that the latter was the case.
Why? The hypothesis was that
the DNC was not serving as an
unbiased referee, but rather was biased
pro-Clinton. And it was believed
a priori that Clinton would begin the primary in
the lead and with the most money,
and that the more debating she did, and
the more visible it was, then the more
chances her rivals would have. (E.g. with no debates at
all, or no viewership,
she'd have the best chances to retain her
initial lead.) Therefore,
the Democratic debate schedule was intentionally
set up ahead of time to help Clinton.

That conspiracy theory was fueled by several other
facts, all seeming compatible with it.
Wikileaked emails from within the DNC unveiled the
facts that

DNC communications chief
Luis Miranda, instructed his staff to put out,
in a "unattributable manner,"
allegations that Bernie Sanders'
supporters were engaged in acts of violence.

There also were email discussions within the DNC
about exposing – or, rather, claiming –
that Bernie Sanders was an atheist,
because that hopefully would hurt his
popularity in the South.

Donna Brazile, then a journalist with CNN,
emailed
Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri
on 12 March
that "From time to time, I get the questions in advance."
and then used the rest of the email to
inform
Hillary Clinton ahead of time of the wording of a
question about the death penalty
to be asked her at a CNN-run "town hall" (although ostensibly
such questions were unknown to the candidates ahead of
time). The question then indeed was asked
at the town hall on 13 March, with quite similar
wording, including re-using the numbers "1414," "1973,"
"156," and "1976"; the words were not exactly the
same, but it later was found that the question
had undergone editing and originally
had been exactly the same as in Brazile's email.
Brazile was fired by CNN on 31 Oct.
after this story broke, but
was immediately hired by the DNC as "interim chair."

The head of the DNC, congresswoman
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, resigned during
the Democratic National Convention in July
after this email/bias scandal broke.
However, she was immediately hired by Clinton's
presidential campaign.

Wasserman-Schultz shut down Sanders' access to
DNC data and had to be sued before restoring it;
also she conveniently overlooked
(despite a
complaint
filed by Sanders
following a Washington Post story about it)
what seem to me
to be blatantly illegal use by Clinton
of the DNC as a money-launderer to permit her
to effectively evade campaign-finance
donation limits.

Both the Sanders and O'Malley campaigns accused
the DNC of acting in a pro-Clinton biased
manner, rather than their ostensibly
unbiased role, during the primaries. E.g.
Lis Smith, a former aide to primary
contender Martin O'Malley, told
The Atlantic.
"The emails just confirmed what we already knew;
[Wasserman-Schultz] was not an honest broker
in this process. She should have been gone long ago."
And Sanders told NBC,
"Nobody has apologized.
But this [scandal] does not come as a surprise to me or
my supporters. There is no doubt that the DNC was
on Secretary Clinton's campaign from day one."

I do not know whether the pro-Clinton bias
of the DNC was enormous or small,
but it is clearly proven that, in at least some cases,
it existed.

The DNC emails were widely claimed (without any
published proof; the evidence was secret) to have been
leaked by "Russian hackers" ultimately directed by
Vladimir Putin.
Wikileaks and its head Julian Assange
have never revealed any of their sources and indeed
often do not know their sources. However,
27-year-old DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered on 10 July
(shot in the back while walking on a
street in Washington DC; he was not robbed
and the motive and killer remain unknown).
Assange then implied in a television interview
that possibly Rich might have been the source or
somehow involved, and in any case Wikileaks on
9 August offered a $20000 reward for information
leading to the arrest of Rich's killer.

As of this writing, it has not been collected.

Wikileaks head Julian Assange, and another Wikileaks
figure Craig Murray, both claimed that their source
was not either Russia nor indeed any "state actor"
and claimed that they both knew (in this particular case)
the identity of the leaker.

To explore ways in which the DNC and
"Democratic establishment" may have put their thumbs on
the scales to favor Hillary Clinton over her top rival
(for the Democratic nomination) Bernie Sanders,
let us examine the two biggest Democratic-party-controlled states:
California and New York.

A policy of the DNC and the completely-Democrat-controlled
California government, which definitely hurt
Sanders tremendously versus Clinton,
was uncovered by investigative journalist
Greg Palast. The issue is as follows. Sanders
had a big advantage among "independent" voters, while Clinton
was preferred by "registered Democrats."
The former were more numerous; and not-coincidentally, USA-wide,
Sanders was preferred over Clinton.
However, what mattered for the purpose of winning the
Democratic party's presidential nomination
was not the USA-wide preference, but rather the preferences of
the small subset
of the USA which voted in the Democratic primaries.
In "open primary" states, anybody is allowed to
vote in any party's primary, for example
a Republican, Green, or Independent
could vote in the Democratic primary
(but you must vote in at most one party's primary).
In "closed primary" states, only registered Democrats could.
And in California, registered independents ("NPPs")
were allowed to vote in the Democratic (but not Republican!)
party primary.

The claimed Clinton-Sanders preferences are from a
USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll
surveying 1500 voters (19-31 May 2016)
which included 903 Democratic and 503 "likely Democratic"
voters; and the Field Research Corp.
poll 26-31 May
consisting of 1002 (79% Democrat and 21% NPP) likely voters.
There also was a Marist/WSJ poll (29-31 May)
which found either a 2 point lead for
Clinton or a 1 point lead for Sanders,
depending on how it is interpreted.
In short, all three polls agreed the race was very close;
but obviously, by far the most crucial question was
what the NPP/Dem composition of the Califormia
Dem-primary electorate, was going to be.

The answer was revealed by the 7 June official vote total
reported by the
LA Times – a huge 55.8:43.2
for Clinton, vastly outside the claimed margins of error of any of these polls!
[UPDATE: 5 weeks later,
scpr.org
claimed a revised count found Clinton had only won by 53.1 to 46.0 percent.]
So evidently, the NPPs were heavily excluded from the voter
pool, to a far greater degree than any pollster expected.

Why? Well, the Democratic Party, rather than
encouraging as many NPPs as they could
to vote in the Democratic primary,
kept the fact that they were allowed to do that, and how,
very very quiet.
And, more importantly, CA's election officials
were instructed in their official
training, to give NPPs ballots not containing
a presidential slot, unless the NPP in question
then came back and specifically asked for a
special "crossover" ballot
using the special magic word "crossover" that most people
would be unlikely to know.
Let us quote Palast:

In some counties like Los Angeles, it's not easy for
an NPP to claim their right to vote in the Democratic primary
– and in other counties, nearly impossible.

Example: In Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, if you don't say the magic words,
"I want a Democratic crossover ballot," you are
automatically given a ballot without the presidential race.
And get ready for this: if an NPP voter asks the poll worker,
"How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary?"
they are instructed to reply that
"NPP voters can't get Democratic ballots."
They are ordered not to breathe a word that the voter can get a
"crossover" ballot that includes the presidential race.

I'm not kidding. This is from the official Election Officer Training Manual page 49:

"A No Party Preference voter will need to request a crossover ballot from the Roster Index Officer. (Do not offer them a crossover ballot if they do not ask)."

They're not kidding. Poll worker Jeff Lewis filed a description
of the training in an official declaration to a federal court:

Someone raised their hand and asked a follow-up question:
"So, what if someone gets a nonpartisan ballot,
notices it doesn't have the presidential candidates
on it, and asks you where they are?
The answer poll workers are instructed to give:
"Sorry, NPP ballots don't have presidential candidates on them."
That's correct: even when people ask
questions of that nature, obviously intending to vote with a party.

This affidavit, and several even more
horrifying, come from Election Justice USA, a
non-partisan watchdog, hoping to get injunctions
to stop this nonsense. [Hear my talk with the group's spokesman, Paul Thomas, on a special edition of the The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Elections Crime Bulletin, which I host with Dennis Bernstein on the Pacifica Radio Network.]

Let me throw in another complication.
Nearly half of Californians vote by mail,
ballots sent to your home automatically.
Most NPP voters don't realize that, to vote in the Democratic
primary, they must bring in their NPP ballot with the envelope,
and say these magic words:
"I want to surrender my ballot in return for a Democratic 'crossover' ballot."

Got that memorized? Because if you don't,
if you say the wrong syllables, in some counties,
you will be denied a Democratic presidential ballot.

...It gets far worse. There are simply not enough "crossover"
ballots printed.
If they run out... [according to Election Justice's filed affadavits]
poll workers were told to give NPP voters "provisional" ballots
even if they say the magic words "I want a crossover Democratic ballot."
As I've previously reported, provisional ballots are "placebo"
ballots that let you feel like you've voted, but you [often] haven't.

[Palast then noted that his KPFK co-host, Cary Harrison, an NPP,
was denied voting twice in West Hollywood.
He then drove to a new precinct as directed
and was again denied a ballot.]

You can read
Election Justice's Report
about this and other techniques
for biasing the primary against Sanders and
for Clinton. (I am not necessarily endorsing
everything this report said, but certainly
it said many true and disturbing things.)

Another election-biasing ploy,
unfortunately commonplace in the contemporary USA,
is intentionally-biased
purging.
That is, in many US states, the head of
election-counting (often with hire and fire power over
every employee) is the "secretary of state" (SoS),
often intentionally chosen to be the
single most-biased person in that state.
(For example, Ken Blackwell, the Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair in Ohio,
was the Ohio SoS in charge of counting Ohio's 2004 votes for
or against Bush.)
And states must purge their voter-registration lists
periodically due to registrants dying, moving away, etc.
But the law often allows the SoS to select who
will be purged and when, so that, e.g, Blackwell
conducted pre-election
purges in predominantly Democratic areas of the state.

In the case of the 2016 Democratic Primary in New York state,
Clinton as former NY senator was very well connected
with the entirely-Democratic-controlled NY state
government, and had an excellent
"machine" to deliver votes. But Sanders was actually
born and raised in NY, specifically Brooklyn, so
was not a complete foreigner. He lived in Vermont,
a neighboring state
with characteristics similar to "upstate" NY.

So what happened in NY's Dem-primary? To a good
approximation, Clinton won NY City and suburbs, while Sanders won
everyplace else, i.e. upstate NY, with the net
result being a big win for Clinton by a 290
Kvote margin
out of about 2 million cast.
But, oddly enough, there were two mysterious
purges of 125K voters in Brooklyn – the one borough
of NY City where Sanders might a priori have been
expected to have an advantage – in 2015,
by the completely-Democrat-controlled NY government.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio described
"the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters."
The purge was only announced in the NY Times
the day after the primary, when it became blindingly apparent
that huge numbers of Brooklyn voters had been turned away.
Both purges were illegal to perform at their dates
under NY state law, but nevertheless occurred.
This supposedly was a mere "mistake."

Also, for other
mysterious reasons, polls were open for different amounts of time
in different places, with the Sanders upstate areas getting
fewer hours, and the Clinton NY City and nearby areas getting more hours.

To quote a pre-election announcement:
"In New York city and counties of
Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester,
Rockland, Orange, Putnam and Erie,
polls will open at 6am-9pm (EST);
all other counties will have polling hours between noon and 9pm (EST)."

Well, amazingly enough, Clinton
won:
NY City, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester,
Rockland, Orange, and Erie,
with Sanders winning only Putnam among the
long-hours locations! Meanwhile among NY's 50 short-hours counties,
Clinton won only 2. (And actually the situation seems even more
biased than this makes it appear since, based on voter complaints, it
seems the hours in reality
often were more biased than the pre-planned claimed hours.)

Meanwhile, in a related (?) story, Donald Trump claimed at many times
during the Republican primaries that they were "rigged."
Those claims were not entirely divorced from reality.
(Trump also seemed to agree the Democratic primaries
were rigged, although they were not his
main focus.)

Greg Palast's conspiracy theory about "CrossCheck":
is discussed here.
He grandiloquently claimed that was how "the election was stolen."
CrossCheck was indeed a suspicious and dubious program
that did look designed to bias the general election to
give Trump an artificial advantage.
However, Palast's numbers simply do
not add up to enough of an effect to have
stolen the election. At most,
CrossCheck "stole" Michigan – but no other
state, not even in combination
with Johnson & Stein's spoiler effects.

CBS News' exit
poll
(apparently actually performed by
Edison
Research)
posed the hypothetical question of who third party
voters would support if the race were only Clinton and Trump.
It found both Johnson and Stein supporters appeared to support Clinton over
Trump by about 25 to 15 percent.
But 55% of Johnson's supporters would have just sat out the election,
as would 61% of Jill Stein supporters.

"The exit polling asked voters they would have cast ballots for if
there were only two candidates (Clinton and Trump).
A quarter of Johnson voters said Clinton, 15 percent said Trump, and
55 percent said they would not have voted. Numbers were similar for
Stein voters, with about a quarter saying they would have chosen
Clinton, 14 percent saying Trump, and 61 percent saying they
would not have voted."
–
Stanley Feldman and Melissa Herrmann:
CBS
News Exit Polls: How Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency,
9 Nov. 2016.

Meanwhile according to
New
York Times exit polling, 63% of voters who
voted for somebody other than the two major-party candidates said
they would not have voted at all in a two-candidate race, with
21% going for Clinton and 16% for Trump.

Therefore, Johnson & Stein by running did
hurt Clinton – and presumably did "spoil" Michigan, i.e.
caused Trump to win Michigan instead of Clinton.
However, their spoiler effects, even combined,
were not enough to swing any other state toward Trump.
And Trump still had enough electoral votes to win even if Michigan
and Wisconsin both switched to Clinton.

So Johnson and Stein were not spoilers, i.e. Trump still
would have defeated Clinton in a 2-way race.

Although the press devoted a fair amount of sound and fury
to the prospect
that Johnson might be a spoiler, it
failed to mention the far more likely possibility
that Hillary Clinton was a spoiler.
The decisive questions are:

if Clinton (and possibly also Stein)
had dropped out of the (general election)
race, leaving it as a head-to-head battle
between Johnson and Trump, would Johnson have won?

if Clinton
had dropped out shortly before the end of the
primary race, causing Sanders to instead become the
Democratic Party nominee, would Sanders have won?

My answers are:

Yes, with probability=60%. (See below.)

Yes, with probability>95%.
This is based on 21 Sanders-vs-Trump pairwise polls, every one won by Sanders
by margins ranging from 4% to 24%. (And note 4% far exceeds the maximum
popular vote margin ever attained by an electoral vote loser.)
It also is based on the known official final results, which indicated
that even a slight improvement over
Clinton's pairwise performance versus Trump, would have sufficed
to make her win; and the fact (based on polls) that Sanders did outperform
Clinton substantially (i.e. margin greater by about 8% of the
number of voters) by that measure.
The only way to dispute this is to speculate that,
if Sanders had been nominated,
then new attacks would have come against Sanders,
which would have been much more effective in hurting him relative to Trump,
than the attacks which did come against Clinton.
This seems unlikely because Clinton simply had more severe-seeming
attackable problems than Sanders did.
There was, for example, no ongoing FBI investigation
of Sanders, he never was paid over $100,000 to give a speech,
and he'd had a lifelong record (unequalled by any other major rival)
of refusing both PAC money
and all large individual dollar contributions.
As one commentator put it, Clinton was "the Queen of Wall Street,
while Sanders is the cleanest major politician during
the last 50 years."

In other words, not only was Clinton almost certainly a spoiler, but
it indeed is more likely than not that she was a spoiler
in two different ways.

Justification of answer 1.
Unfortunately, "pairwise" polls about any pair besides the two
major-party candidates, are rarely performed by pollsters in
the contemporary USA. However, one
was
performed and released to the media (which of course then almost entirely ignored it)
by the Johnson/Weld campaign:

Poll Question:
For whom would you vote for president if the choice was between
Republican Donald Trump
and Libertarian Gary Johnson?
(Nationwide telephone
poll
on 8-9 October 2016.)
Result:

The Johnson-Trump difference
was 33 pollees out of the 757 total respondents, and this really
should be regarded as 33±13.56 after
putting in a ±1σ error bar, if
we (rather optimistically) just use errors for one of the two candidates.
And if we assume (as a worst case assumption)
that the errors for both candidates are exactly anti-correlated, then
33±27.12.
Consulting a
table of
the normal distribution, we see that this
2.43σ or 1.22σ result indicates
99.25% or 88.88% confidence that Johnson would have defeated Trump –
at the time of the poll and provided the undecideds are ignored.

Also asked: "Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Gary Johnson?"
Fav=15.2%, Unfav=30.0%, NoOpinion=38.1%, Never heard of GJ=16.7%.
And: "For whom would you vote for president if the choice was between
Democrat Hillary Clinton
and Libertarian Gary Johnson?"
Clinton=345, Johnson=280, Undecided=132, (Total=757).

This claim can be disputed.
It is based on only one poll, and that poll was released by
a biased group, the Johnson/Weld campaign. I doubt that the poll was a lie.
(The reason a money-limited campaign pays for a poll is to find out the truth.
And if it were a lie, then why not also try to create a more
pro-Johnson impression about
the "Johnson losing to Clinton" simultaneous pairwise result, and why publicize
the low approval this poll found for Johnson, considerably lower than
in independent public polls up til then?)
However, if the Johnson/Weld campaign had conducted (say) five polls, but only
released the one that made them look the best versus Trump
– which seems fairly likely –
then the public would get a
distorted impression from that one poll, and to correct for that
our "99.25% or 88.88% confidence" claims would
need to be downgraded by a factor of 5 ("Bonferroni correction")
to obtain (as lower bounds) 96.25% or 44.40% confidence.
The former figure would mean Johnson still
is a fairly good bet; the latter means Johnson-Trump
was too close a pair to call.

More precisely: 100-99.25=0.75, multiply by 5 to get 3.75,
and 100-3.75=96.25.

Furthermore (the disputers could continue),
this poll was conducted at a comparatively unpropitious (?) time for
Donald Trump: 8-9 October, shortly after the release of the
"Access Hollywood" videotape in which Trump in 2005
boasted of his ability to
"grab [women] by the pussy"
and indeed "do anything" to them with impunity because he was a "star."
This probably was not Trump's lowest point – things would
seem to have gotten even worse for him somewhat later, in view of the
following timeline:

Morning of 8 Oct 2016: "Access Hollywood" videotape released by Washington Post in
article
by David A. Fahrenthold.

Night of 9 Oct: Second (of three) Debates between Trump & Clinton.
Trump, asked about the tape, says it was merely "locker room talk" and denies ever actually doing
what he said he'd done on the tape, in reality.

Debate moderator Anderson Cooper: Have you ever done those things?
Trump: No I have not.

12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 22, 27 Oct:
starting on 12 October and continuing over the next two weeks,
woman after woman came forward to the media
claiming Trump indeed had "groped" them without their consent,
often quite similarly to
the way he'd explained it on the videotape. There also were more who'd
made the accusations publicly and/or in court
well before 2015, but obtained little media attention at those
earlier times. Many of these women
were found by journalists (upon checking) to have corroboration,
such as people they'd
told about it years before the Clinton-Trump race began.
In all, The Guardian by 27 October had
tallied 24 women making such
allegations about events spaced within the preceding 30 years.

Night of 19 Oct: In the third and final presidential debate,
Trump suggested that the rush of accusations was either orchestrated by the
Clinton campaign or the product of women seeking "10 minutes of fame."
Plus, in speeches he called his accusers "horrible, horrible liars"
and said that after the election he would sue them all.

Despite not being the lowest, 8-9 October likely was a comparatively
low moment for Trump,
plausibly lower than on election day (8 Nov). Further complicating the issue
was the fact that a lot of the official voting occurred "early,"
namely during the period 29 Sept.-8 Nov. (The allowed early-voting
periods varied depending on state but participating states typically began it
about 22 Oct.)

The final grounds for disputation were that this poll
pertained to the popular
vote (predicting 4.4% pairwise margin for Johnson-Trump),
whereas what would actually matter would be the electoral vote.
Historically, the popular and electoral winners have coincided
over 90% of the time.
And the whole judgment ignores the "undecideds," whose number was substantial.

My bottom line:
pending any further pairwise poll data
(since at present I know of no other such poll),
my personal estimate is that there was about a
60% chance that Clinton
was a spoiler since Johnson would have defeated Trump head to head.

If so, this poll plus the official election results also
would imply the existence of a
Condorcet cycle

Johnson > Trump > Clinton > Johnson

where "A>B" means "A would defeat B in a head-to-head race using official system."

Not only that, it would show that Clinton not only was a spoiler with the official
election method, but also was an
IRVspoiler,
i.e. by running, Clinton prevented Johnson's victory over Trump
using instant runoff voting.

In other words, anti-Trump pro-Clinton voters, by honestly voting
Clinton-top, would with instant runoff voting (as well as
with the official actually-used voting system) have made a strategic mistake.
They would have been better off dishonestly voting Johnson top,
because that would have caused a better election result in their view.
It is often contended – of course utterly
falsely – by
instant runoff proponents that IRV "eliminates" the spoiler effect and the "wasted vote"
problem, or somehow weakens 2-party domination permitting "third parties" to win.
This 2016 election provides
yet another refutation, perhaps the most prominent, of those false claims.

And of course
Trumpstill would have won the general
election with instant runoff voting conducted
either within states, or within the electoral college.
However with a straight nationwide vote (no electoral college)
Clinton
would have won with IRV.

These facts are proven by the official election results combined with the
CBS News exit poll's
question about "second choices" of third-party voters.

The only possible way to dispute this would be to hope that
strategic lying on the official (plurality style) ballots
was so vast, that actually with instant runoff voting,
the voters would have been way more honest and less
naively-strategic, causing
Clinton and Trump not anymore to reach the "final two."
However, that hope is quashed by
the Civis online poll, which actually did
ask their respondents to provide rank-order ballots,
and indeed did find that Trump and Clinton were the final two,
with 43.8% ranking Clinton top and 43.8%
ranking Trump top.
(Civis also approximately confirmed the "25 to 15"
finding about
Trump/Clinton preferences of Johnson and Stein voters from
the CBS exit poll.)
The difference between 43.8% and the 10.4% who ranked anybody
besides Clinton and Trump top is so great that, despite issues
I have with the quality of the Civis poll, this particular claim
seems indisputable.

Obviously, those pairwise results for Johnson-vs-Clinton and Johnson-vs-Trump
demonstrate that Johnson, in truth, was vastly more supported
by the American public than one would suspect from his
3.3% sliver of the official plurality vote.
(Which also is independently
demonstrated by the approval- and
score-voting polls
that we shall discuss soon.)
Indeed, it even is arguable that Johnson actually should have won
the presidency.

This enormous distortion is caused by strategic voting imperatives
("must not 'waste my vote' by voting for anybody besides the leading two")
which in the earlier USA 2000 election were known from NES data to have caused 90% of
honestly Nader- or Buchanan-favoring voters to vote for somebody else.
This is a well known defect of the USA's abysmal
plurality voting system.

A different way to see that strategic distortion at work:
The top 7 states for Gary Johnson (highest 7 percentages
of popular vote) were, in descending order,

All those states were "easy call" states in which
the |Trump-Clinton| margin ranged from 8.2% (NM) up to over 45%
of the vote (WY).
Meanwhile, in the 8 closest
states – those with |Trump-Clinton| margins below 3% –
Johnson always got ≤5.1%.

That is presumably because those states' voters knew that
voting for Johnson incurred extremely tiny risk of causing a "spoiler"
scenario. There is one exception:
The 8th-most pro-Johnson state, Maine (ME),
which voted 5.1% for Johnson, actually did have
a small |Trump-Clinton| margin (2.7%),
but Maine is one of the two
states that awards its electoral votes by congressional district
rather than statewide, and those districts are "gerrymandered,"
so again its voters knew they had low spoiler risk.

Similarly, but more clearly:
the top 17 states (regarding DC as a "state" for this purpose)
most-supporting Jill Stein,
all were extremely "easy call" states with
|Trump-Clinton| margins ranging between 12% and 85%
– plus Maine:

HI, OR, VT, KS, ME,
AK, CA, MT, MA, CT,
WA, NY, DC, IL, DE,
RI, MD.

This extra clarity
was perhaps because Green voters were more cautious than
Libertarian voters due to their previous bad experience
with Ralph Nader as a Green Party spoiler in 2000.

Yet another signature of the huge distortion:
An online post-election
poll
by
Civis Analytics (1084 registered voters who said they'd voted,
Nov. 15-16, poll commissioned by Vox.com)
found that the percentages of voters who
"found [candidate] acceptable or somewhat acceptable,"
and who would have voted for that candidate in a head-to-head race
versus Clinton, were respectively

Candidate

Acceptable or Somewhat

Preferred over Clinton

Hillary Clinton

48.4

–

Donald Trump

46.7

49.3

Gary Johnson

32.4

45.0

Jill Stein

29.0

42.1

Evan McMullin

25.9

39.1

Darrell Castle

17.6

37.5

These percentages are vastly greater than
anybody would have naively guessed from these candidates'
official vote shares.

[But I warn the reader that the Civis poll because based on
a sample of online
voters with unstated "demographic correction factors,"
is of less reliability than genuinely random telephone polls
conducted by established pollsters who publish full polling reports.
My requests to Civis for their raw data, fuller data, or a report,
all were ignored. Despite those problems, I think the effects we
just reported are so enormous that they cannot be disputed.]

The enormous costs the USA (and hence world) are paying for foolishly using that system
were quite clearly demonstrated yet again by this 2016 election.
Here is a list of features of Trump/2016 – most or all of which were bad –
which set new records:

On election, Trump with 37 or 38% approval
was the least-approved
president
(during the era of
approval-style polling, i.e. starting in the late 1940s, at
the date of first assuming office, except in Trump's case
we use election day).
Furthermore, Clinton, if she had won, also would have been
the least-approved
ever, with 41 or 42% approval.
The previous low was Gerald Ford with 47%
initial approval, as we see in this graphic from Gallup.
(Also Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman
jointly held the record for
lowest approval time-averaged over their entire terms,
at about 45.5% each. Since evidently approval usually decreases during
presidential terms we have good a priori reason to suspect Trump
will be one of the worst presidents in the last 100 years.)
Furthermore,
according to several pollsters using various approval- and score-based
measures, Trump was the least-wanted among all his historical
rivals (i.e. major-party presidential nominees of the past)
at the same month
in their campaigns, during April, May, June and July –
and Clinton also would have held that record all those
months too if it were not for Trump.
(Example,
another,
another.)
The previous worst had been Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Update:
Additional post-election polls found that, e.g,
Trump approval
was 37% favorable and 51% unfavorable
in a Quinnipiac nationwide telephone poll of 899 voters nationwide
on 5-9 January 2017.
So there is no question Trump was the least-approved president
(on day 1) ever recorded.
Meanwhile, the public's job-approval rating for congress
was also abysmal. The all-time low according to Gallup during
1974-2016, was 9% approval, achieved in Nov. 2013. By early Nov. 2015,
congress had improved to 11% approval and 86% disapproval.
(The highest ever had been 84% approval in October 2001.)
This was probably due to a Republican policy of total obstructionism
in both branches of congress throughout the Obama administration, combined with
several times threatening to shut down the entire government as a blackmail
tactic.

The 2016 election had the highest-ever-recorded "gender gap":
13 points:

Percentages of women and men
voting for Democratic US presidential candidate.

However, the sexism combined with racism (?) in the sense that 52% of
white women voted for Trump.

Trump was, by a goodly lead, the lyingest
major presidential candidate the USA ever had (during the era of
fact-checking organizations, i.e. starting 2003;
"major" here meaning "anybody looking ≥15% likely to win one
of the top-two-parties' nominations"), as reckoned
unanimously by all
of the USA's top three independent fact-checking entities
politifact.com, factcheck.org, and Washington Post fact checker.
Here is Trump's (astounding) politifact report
card
as of election day 2016:

This was based on Politifact's checks of 331 statements by Trump; 70% of
his statements fell in their mostly-false, false,
or pants-on-fire categories!
And here is the Washington Post's independent
fact-checking summary of H.Clinton and Trump as of 3 Nov. 2016:

With
24 women
publicly accusing Trump of
sex-assaults or other sexual misconduct, that surely also
was a record.

Trump, at 70, was the oldest ever to ascend to the US presidency.
But fear not – despite his age, Trump's physician provided a
letter
to the press "stating unequivocally" that Trump would be
"the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

Trump was the least qualified US president ever,
in the sense that he was the only one with
no previous government
(civilian or military) job experience. (In contrast,
Hillary Clinton's extensive experiences would have
made her one of the most qualified
presidents ever, while Gary Johnson was former governor of New Mexico
as well as a wealthy self-made businessman.)
Trump supporters could console themselves with the fact that his
VP Mike Pence (governor of Indiana 2013-2016, and US congressman 2001-2013)
had 15 years of experience. Unfortunately during his
12 years as congressman, while Pence wrote 90 bills and resolutions,
he failed to get even a single one to pass into law.

Trump was the most litigious US president ever,
as is detailed in USA Today's
interactive
database
Three decades, 4095 lawsuits.
(And probably there are more than 4095 based on the fact that
USA Today's tally kept growing as they kept finding more,
for many months. Their
initial
tally
in June 2016 was only about 3500.
Also, Trump threatened to sue people
far more often than he actually did –
probably tens of thousands of times.)
Hundreds of the lawsuits were the result of Trump
refusing to
pay people he'd done business with.
Even if Trump spent only
1 day per lawsuit, excluding weekends and holidays,
that would mean at least 16 out of those 30 years
of his life consisted of him either suing or being sued!
Probably that would be physically impossible for
almost anybody else to accomplish, even if they tried.
At least
75 of the lawsuits still are in progress as Trump enters
the Oval Office, most notably cases alleging his "Trump University"
was a fraudulent "get rich quick" scam...
...and one of the three rape cases. (The other
two rapes were settled. The third, still ongoing,
case
alleges both Trump and billionaire and convicted/jailed sex offender
Jeffrey Epstein
in 1994 both repeatedly and collaboratively
raped a 13-year-old girl – the plaintiff, called "Jane Doe" for
mysterious legal purposes in the case. The lawsuit includes
a witness of 4 of those rapes by Trump, which means it should
be taken more seriously than most rape cases, because witnesses of
rapes are rare.)
Update: The Trump university case
was settled after Trump agreed to pay $25 million in damages,
thus refunding about 50% of the tuition paid by the 6000 plaintiffs.

Trump was the most married & divorced president ever,
with 3 marriages and 2 divorces (so far). They always
are younger than him and keep getting younger:

Only one preceding president divorced even once:
Ronald Reagan. That presumably is because
presidents tend to have excellent "people/relationship skills,"
good career success,
and high attractiveness,
and as a side effect their marriages succeed more often than
most people's.

Trump as far as I can tell was the only major presidential candidate
ever to publicly call for a foreign power to spy on the USA,
and in particular on his political opponent:

Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find
the 30,000 emails that are missing [from emails that Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department].
I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
Let's see if that happens. That will be next. Yes, sir.
–
Trump in a lengthy news conference in Doral, Florida
[Ashley Parker & David E. Sanger:
Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton's Missing EmailsNew York Times 27 July 2016; electronic version
includes video of Trump saying it.]

Also, if it is correct (as many US intelligence agencies claimed)
that Russian intelligence made a concerted effort
to influence this election in Trump's favor, then
(a) in view of how close the election was, that effort likely was successful,
and (b) this marks the first time in US history that
any such attempt was successful.

Some have argued that a better system
than "democracy" would be "epistocracy"
(a coined word meaning "rule by the knowledgeable")
in which, only "knowledgeable" people would be
allowed to vote, or more knowledge would give your vote greater weight,
or some such.
I am dubious epistocracy could be safely accomplished.
But regardless of that debate,
this election did provide some experiments about precisely
that question.
Namely, a set of people unquestionably more-knowledgeable than
the average voter, were
the editorial boards of major US newspapers.
Here is a tally by wikipedia
of the endorsements made by the USA's 100 top
(reckoned by paid circulations) newspapers:

#newspapers

2016 presidential endorsement

57

Hillary Clinton (Democ)

4

Gary Johnson (Liber)

3

Not Trump (anti-endorsement!)

2

Donald Trump (Repub)

34

(No endorsement made)

(This compares with the preceding 2012 election,
in which the major newspaper endorsements split approximately 51/48/1 percent
for Obama/Romney/Johnson.)
So it seems likely that 2016 was the single most-lopsidedly-bad
US election ever,
reckoned by major newspaper endorsements; and this "epistocracy"
differed quite drastically from the actual democracy.
A different set of people more knowledgeable than average
about Trump were the residents
of Manhattan where Trump (who lived there, in the penthouse of
"Trump Tower," since its construction ended in 1983)
had been a major figure for 35 years.
Manhattan's vote
was:
Clinton 515481, Trump 58935, approximately a 9:1 ratio.
(Plus Stein and Johnson each got about 1%.)
Finally, another set of
people more knowledgeable than average
were former presidents.
All former presidents still alive at the time of this election
(Obama, Bush II, W.Clinton, Bush I, Carter) unanimously said –
either to the press or to multiple
sources who told the press – they
were voting for Clinton, with the exception
of Bush II, who told
USA Today
he'd intentionally not
voted for President.

Trump's bigtime public political career began in March 2011 with his
trumpeting (e.g. on television)
of the "birther conspiracy." This was
the theory that then-sitting President Obama was not really born in
Hawaii USA, because his birth certificates were fraudulent
– he'd somehow been brought as a young child to the USA by
evil forces who'd pre-programmed him to become an evil president? –
and therefore Obama actually was ineligible to be president.
Trump was by far the loudest voice for the "Birthers."
He claimed he'd sent investigators to Hawaii to research the matter
("and they can't believe what they're finding!"),
but never said who they were or what they found.
Finally in September 2016, Trump for the first time
publicly acknowledged that Obama was born in the USA –
then falsely claimed the rumors to the contrary had been started by
Hillary Clinton in 2008!
[Maggie Haberman & Alan Rappeport:
Trump Drops False 'Birther' Theory, but Floats a New One:
Clinton Started It,
New York Times 16 Sept. 2016.]
This is probably
the only time in world history that a prominent national leader
publicly disavowed his own signature career-commencing act,
and then attributed it to his rival (who of course had been attacking
and ridiculing it all along).

Trump was the only major presidential candidate
since the 1960s to refuse to release his taxes.

Trump may or may not have been the wealthiest US President.
The three richest were D.J.Trump, J.F.Kennedy, and
George Washington; but I am unable to decide the correct ordering among them.
Trump thoughout his life
greatly exaggerated his wealth.
With economic inequality at or nearing record-high levels in the 2016 USA
(mainly due to the rich effectively compounding their money faster than the
rest of us, a trend which started with Reagan's great lowering of
high-end tax rates in the early 1980s, and probably helped by the onset of
"globalization") it seems unlikely that Trump's proposals for further lowering
of high end and corporate tax rates – apparently designed
to enhance his personal financial situation? – are going to improve that.
Trump's actual wealth is extremely unclear because:

He refused to release his taxes.

The contracts and loans he signs often were kept secret.

Many of "his" holdings actually are partly or entirely owned
by others. For example near the end of his Presidential campaign (4 Nov.) the
"Trump International Hotel & Tower" in Toronto –
the tallest residential building in Canada – was placed into receivership
just 4 years after Trump and his children conducted its opening ceremony.
Yet another bankruptcy for The Donald? Actually not, since according to press reports
his company had not built it and his ownership share was zero! The Trump Organization
merely managed its operations, plus ran various misleading promotions
which made it seem like the developer/owner.
That all turned out to be bad news for the actual owners.

Trump's business is a privately held corporation
– in contrast to publicly held, i.e. stock-traded, corporations,
which have legal disclosure requirements.

Actually Trump, in 1995 when presumably
in severe financial trouble, did create
a stock-traded corporation "DJT," raising $140 million in its initial
public offering. He then talked it up and made things look promising,
getting its stock price to multiply 2.5× in 1 year.
At that point, according to
Fortune
magazine,
"Trump's 41% stake [was] worth around $400 million,
[which] was perhaps the only time a major pillar of [Trump's]
net worth was verifiable and transparent."
Then Trump switched to basically acting as a "corporate raider" on his
own corporation (he had complete control as
chairman of its board for its entire existence,
CEO for about half, and the stock he owned was of a special class
unavailable to others that carried many more votes),
sucking its assets and market value out into his own pocket
via a variety of absurd transactions with other Trump-owned companies
(while leaving its debt in place), plus paying himself enormous bonuses for
his "excellent performance" –
albeit causing its investors to lose 90 cents out of each invested dollar
by early 2005 after it declared bankruptcy with a net declared loss of $647 million
(it had lost money every year).
The investors were virtually wiped out, but it was
an excellent killing for The Donald.
As you can see from the graphics, DJT vastly underperformed both the stock
market as a whole, and its casino-stock segment.
Indeed, it was by far the single worst performing among all casino stocks.
Aggregated over the 3 years
2000, 2001, and 2002 (observe DJT's "excellent" performance during
that period on the lefthand graphic),
DJT paid Trump $4.25 million in salaries, $8.7 million
in bonuses and/or "other compensation," and $1.5 million in stock options.
After DJT's demise, Trump immediately did it again, in December 2004 creating TRMP,
his second publicly traded corporation (consisting largely of remnants of DJT),
whose fate was similar.
At one campaign speech I witnessed,
Trump waved an official-looking piece of paper,
and said it was his latest "net worth" which "just came in" and read $12 billion.
Meanwhile
Forbes Magazine in 2016 estimated it at $3.7 billion,
Fortune at
$3.9 billion, and
Bloomberg News
at $3.0 billion.
At the other end of the scale,
Trump's biographer, the financial journalist David Cay Johnston,
estimated Trump actually was worth below $1 billion.

Johnston wrote the 2016 book
The
making of Donald Trump which recounts many stories of how
Trump exaggerated his wealth and about his illegal, unethical, and/or unsavory
business practices. Those caused Trump's fellow New York zillionaire
and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, estimated to be worth $42.7 billion,
to comment
"if Trump wants to run the nation like he's run his business, God help us!"
A larger biography by two Washington Post journalists is
Michael Kranish & Marc Fisher:
Trump
Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power (2016);
and a personal recounting of
Jack O'Donnell's experiences working for Trump as his casino manager is
Trumped! (1991).
O'Donnell paints Trump as an irresponsible mismanager, a huge narcissist
and braggart, the biggest gambler
he ever encountered, a philanderer, and a racist.

But Trump definitely does hold this record: Trump is
the president who had, at one point,
the largest negative wealth, after enormous bankruptcies.
Indeed Trump may not only
hold this record among US presidents, but is in a small group of
contenders for the world record as the person, in all
world history, with the greatest personal debt in bankruptcies!
In a nutshell the situation was this: Trump borrowed heavily, especially
to build/buy huge casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
For example he financed his "Trump Taj Mahal" casino in 1990 with
"junk bonds" at an extraordinarily high 14% interest rate.
After it went under in 1991, the enterprise was $3 billion in debt.
Trump also personally guaranteed a lot of his
debts, i.e using his own personal wealth as collateral, and
reusing that same wealth as more collateral to get different
loans from different lenders (who did not know about the previous loans,
since Trump kept their terms private).
Then in 1992 his "Trump Castle" (opened in 1985) filed for bankruptcy.
And then again in 1992
his also-huge Atlantic City property,
the "Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino," was crushed beneath $550 million in debt
landing Trump in bankruptcy court a third time.
Then again in 1992, he filed
for bankruptcy on the "Trump Plaza" hotel in New York City.
About that time, Trump later told The Washington Post, he passed
a beggar in New York and told his then-wife, model Marla Maples,
"You see that man? Right now he's worth $900 million more than me."
[David S. Hilzenrath and Michelle Singletary:
Trump went broke, but stayed on top,
Washington Post 29 Nov. 1992.]
As a result, Trump should have been personally bankrupt on an enormous scale.
The only reason that did not happen is the old story that "if you default
on a $20000 loan, that's your problem. If it's
$500 million, that's the bank's problem."
Trump's creditors held a conference and agreed (after rancorous
internal disputes) to accept pennies on the dollar,
take over ownership and management control of those casinos, and
allow Trump to financially survive, as opposed to completely wiping him out,
in the hope that he might be able to recover some of their money later.
But the damage continued.
In 2004, Trump faced his fifth corporate bankruptcy,
when "Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts"
became buried under $1.8 billion in debt.
Then in 2009, "Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc." (TRMP)
became his sixth corporate
bankruptcy after missing a $53 million bond interest payment.
After its $4 share price plunged to about 25 cents it was delisted from the NASDAQ.
(As of 2016 some online financial information sites still list it with
share price apparently frozen
at about 6 cents, with trading volume zero.)
After some recovery
it declared bankruptcy yet again in 2014
(which perhaps should count as Trump's seventh bankruptcy?)
and continues on, but now as a subsidiary of Icahn Enterprises
and with ticker symbol now "TER."
So evidently, billions of dollars in loans to Trump and his
Organization were never paid back.
That amounts to a major component of his estimated total wealth.
Indeed if Johnston's estimate that Trump's wealth is below $1 billion is
correct, then Trump actually got substantially
more money in never-repaid loans,
than his total fortune.

According to the Washington Post,
Trump holds the record, by far, as the US president with
the largest and most conflicts of interest.
(Update: in a news conference 11 January 2017, Trump refused either to
sell his businesses or to place his assets in a "blind trust"
while serving as president, which would seem to bring him into
immediate enormous conflict with the "emoluments clause" of
the US constitution and also contradicting numerous
vague claims he'd made during his campaign.
Trump also appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner
as "senior advisor," seeming to bring him into immediate conflict with
anti-nepotism act of 1967.)
One problem was that, after his huge casino-bankruptcies,
essentially all US banks refused ever to loan Trump any money again.
He however was able to obtain financing from foreign banks –
which are known to
include (the highly corrupt) Deutsche Bank, several Japanese banks,
and the National Bank of China,
albeit with Trump continuing to keep his finances private
it is difficult to see the whole story –
although supposedly only under very restrictive terms
which give those banks unusually large amounts of power over him.
Also, Trump's son Eric claimed during the 2016 campaign that
the Trumps' major construction projects
were now mainly in Russia; he is also known to have projects
in India, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia,
United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Malaysia, and China.
Trump also, as election day approached, had an upcoming labor
dispute in Las Vegas, to
be mediated by the NLRB that he (as president) would appoint;
the anti-Trump side could be argued by lawyers from the Justice Department, whose
head also would be appointed by Trump.
Trump's taxes are being audited by the IRS, whose head Trump will appoint.
Trump also had just finished building a large hotel on land he
rents from the US government (GSA) in Washington DC.
Trump will appoint the head of the GSA.
Diplomats from a large number of (essentially all?)
foreign countries are now supposedly
making plans to lodge at that Trump hotel in an effort to bribe him.
[Drew Harwell:
Trump's conflicts of interest are without precedent in
American presidential history,
9 Nov. 2016;
Sam Thielman:
Trump's conflicts of interest take White House
into uncharted territory,
The Guardian, 12 Nov. 2016.]
Trump also has simply
directly held many presidency-related events
at Trump hotels and resorts, billing all attendees,
the Secret Service protecting him, etc, for their
attendance, which typically earns him
around $500K per event.
President-elect
Trump according to press reports (and a later ambiguous
response
by himself) spoke with
British UKIP-leader
Nigel Farage about halting plans
for a wind-energy farm near his
Turnberry golf resort, because it would mar the view.
According to a
report by prominent Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata,
Trump's first post-election phone call with his Argentine
counterpart Mauricio Macri included urging the latter
to steamroll permit issues holding up construction
of a new
Trump-brand skyscraper in Buenos Aires.
Both Macri and Trump quickly denied the report.
[Revelan
que Donald Trump le pidio
permiso a Mauricio Macri para construir su torre en la Ciudad,
La Nacion, 20 Nov 2016.]
Late in October, Phillipine president
Rodrigo Duterte appointed Jose Antonio,
a longtime business associate of Trump's, as
a "special envoy to the United States."
[Richard C. Paddock:
Trump's business partner is new Trade Envoy
to U.S, NY Times 9 Nov 2016.]
In December, Trump's main business partner Dogan
on the "Trump Towers"
project in Istanbul was arrested in an apparent
open-ended effort by Turkish President Erdogan to
coerce Trump.
(Erdogan had earlier, in June, called for Trump's name to
be removed from those towers.)
Trump appoints the heads of the agencies that
investigate/regulate the banks he has huge loans from.
Setya Novanto
happened to be
standing next to Trump when Trump announced
on US television (1 Sept. 2016) from Trump Tower,
his signing of a "loyalty pledge" to the Republican Party.
At that announcement Trump described him to the cameras as
"the Speaker of the House of Malaysia" and a "great man"
who was there with "his whole group" to meet Trump to
"do great things for the United States."
However, what Trump neglected to mention was that Novanto
had been forced to resign as Speaker in December 2015
due to his part in an enormous corruption scandal
attempting to extort Indonesia's largest taxpayer,
U.S. mining giant Freeport, to pay him $4 billion
in bribes. (He was secretly recorded doing so.)
Also as part of the same or related scandals,
global investigators believe more
than $1 billion entered Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak's personal bank accounts.
And, amazingly enough, the man Trump had touted throughout
his early campaign as his greatest friend and future US
Treasury Secretary – Wall Street barracuda
Carl Icahn – was the largest owner
of Freeport!
Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner – also the scion of
an ultra-wealthy New York City real estate family
(his father and business partner
Charles in 2005 was sentenced to two years prison for tax evasion,
witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions) –
also has enormous but largely secret
financial entanglements with Russians and Chinese.

Trump, as one of the central facets of his campaign, pledged to build one of the largest
walls ever constructed along the USA-Mexico border,
plus forcibly deport (with the aid of a new military "deportation force")
illegal immigrants estimated to number about 11 million, which
would be one of the largest forced migrations in human history:

Trump never held a press conference in 2016
after the one on 27 July where he'd urged Russia to hack Hillary's emails.
(Indeed his next one was 11 January 2017, about half a year later.)
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton failed to hold a press conference
throughout a 277-day span between 5 Dec. 2015
and 8 Sept. 2016, with the arguable possible exception of
taking some questions during a minorities conference on 5 August.

This may have been the first USA presidential election
swung by "fake news." Well... certainly, lies
have, historically, often been circulated during campaigns.
But in the present case with the rise of the internet and "social media"
such as "FaceBook," the volume of "fake news" stories circulated became massive
to the point where they actually could overwhelm genuine news.
Many appeared to the eye to have been written by genuine reputable news
agencies such as ABC News (complete with official ABC News logo), etc.
But actually, ABC had nothing to do with it and the story was a complete fabrication.
An analysis by BuzzFeed
[Craig Silverman:
This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook, 16 Nov. 2016]
showed that – stunningly –
FaceBook news feed's
top 20 genuine news stories related to the election
were outperformed by its top 20 election-related fake news stories,
during the period from 1 August to Election day!
Was this enough to swing the election? Certainly.
First, Facebook claimed more than 1.65 billion monthly active users
as of 31 March 2016, far exceeding the USA's electorate, and claimed
those 20 fake news stories got 8.7 million "shares,
reactions, and comments" as measured by FaceBook – the
plain readership
(i.e. readers who just read it without "sharing" or "commenting")
presumably was larger.
Second, BuzzFeed found that
of these top 20 fake news stories,
17 were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton!
That means, unquestionably, that they were the result of a conspiracy.
Third, consider how close the election was. If less than 0.1% of
FaceBook users, or just 6%
of those 8.7 million sharers, reactors, or commentors,
switched their vote to Trump due
to this, that would have been enough.
And keep in mind that FaceBook was only one fake-news venue.

This one seems a bit ominous. According to a compilation by
wikipedia
2013-2014 data;
"Measure of America" calculations using mortality data from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
National Center for Health Statistics 2009,
and population data from the CDC WONDER database,
here are the best 9 US states for life expectancy at birth,
and (on the right) the worst 9 states.

State

Years

State

Years

Hawaii

81.3

S.Carolina

77.0

Minnesota

81.1

Tennessee

76.3

Connecticut

80.8

Kentucky

76.0

California

80.8

Arkansas

76.0

Massachusetts

80.5

Oklahoma

75.9

New York

80.5

Louisiana

75.7

Vermont

80.5

Alabama

75.4

New Hampshire

80.3

W.Virginia

75.4

New Jersey

80.3

Mississippi

75.0

All 9 states on the left voted for Hillary Clinton.
All 9 on the right voted for Donald Trump.

And incredibly, a US state statistic perhaps even more
correlated with Clinton/Trump election result was
each state's percentage of college graduates.

On the left are the 12 most-educated US states as reckoned by the
percentages (ranging from 31-41%)
of their population with a bachelor degree or above during 2011-2015.
Also, Washington DC has 54.6% bachelaureates, surpassing any state.
All 14, plus DC, voted for Clinton.
On the right are the 14 least-educated US states by the same metric
(19-26% bachelaureates).
All of them except Nevada voted for Trump.
[Source: US census.]
Why did Nevada break the pattern?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that
both Nevada and Trump had great experience with gambling casinos.

Will Trump be a great president? I don't know. But all those
simultaneous worst-ever
records are not a good start... for most of them
just that one
would seem under normal circumstances to make him unacceptable as
President.

Incidentally, one could construct a (smaller) list of
often-bad news about Hillary Clinton too.
The most obvious superlative about Clinton is that
she if elected would have been the first female president
(no woman had ever been vice president either, for that matter).

After her husband Bill's presidential terms ended, the Clintons
claimed they were virtually broke, but then Hillary
made over $150 million from giving speeches
to Wall Street firms for $200K to $700K per
speech (text of speeches kept secret and recording forbidden by
special contract), while Bill got at least $17.6 million
for being "honorary chancellor" 2010-2015 of a chain of for-profit
"Laureate universities"
(when their founder Doug Becker was asked
what Clinton did in that "job," he
responded that he'd served as "an inspiration").
Bill Clinton also got huge payments for making speeches, e.g. in May 2012
earned $1.4 million
for a 7-day-long tour giving speeches to rich people's groups in Europe,
and in all earned over $100 million for giving speeches during 2001-2013,
most of it from foreign countries (many while his wife served
as US Secretary of State 2009-2013).
In contrast, the annual salary of
the US president during 2001-2016 was $400K,
while the USA per capita income was about $40K,
so Hillary actually often earned more
for a single speech to a Wall Street Firm,
than she would have gotten for an
entire year's service as US president,
or 10 years earnings for an average citizen.

I don't know about you, but I simply cannot regard those as
"perfectly normal legal economic transactions." They are vastly
outside the norm. The only way I can interpret them
is this: the vast majority of the Clintons' total fortune was acquired
100% corruptly. Considering a major problem faced by the 2016 USA
was its record or near-record high levels of
economic inequality, it did not seem wise to elect somebody
that severely bought and paid for as the "cure."
Also, as Bernie Sanders' campaign (following, e.g, an exposé by the
Washington Post)
pointed out,
Clinton cheated about campaign finance laws, using shenanigans
resembling the game of "3-card monte" to effectively obtain
unlimited individual campaign donations despite
legal limits on donation amounts.

Many in the media proclaimed that it was a "huge surprise" which "nobody predicted"
when Trump won the Republican nomination, and then when he won the presidency,
they said it was the "biggest upset in living memory."

Really?

Well, first of all, I myself publicly
predicted, back in July 2015, that
Trump should easily win the GOP nomination as a consequence of
"fame based failure" historically-confirmed plurality voting dynamics.
(Which, by the way, Trump himself may well have been fully aware of.
At least, he certainly acted like he was.)
So while it may be true that major media-approved pundits using their
usual no-evidence gut-based "methodologies," did
not predict this, it is false to claim "nobody" did.
It is merely that the media was not interested
in what I had to say.

I further went on (back in July 2015) to predict
that

Sanders would be an underdog versus
Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination,
but would provide a tough battle to a fairly close finish.

Trump would then be an underdog versus Hillary Clinton in the general election,
but still would have
a "puncher's chance" to win –
likely depending on scandals, i.e. which one got more
damaged by various possible scandals breaking.

All of those predictions by me turned out, 1.5 years later,
to be correct.
What I did not predict –
but could have if I'd been a bit cleverer –
was that Trump would, toward the end of the GOP primary battle,
encourage anti-Trump voters to stop voting for all
kinds of possible Trump rivals, and instead focus on Cruz alone –
because in his view, Trump and Cruz were the only two left with
serious chances, and any other vote would therefore be "wasted."
(This went against Trump's successful strategy all along of
splitting the vote between all his rivals.)

The reason that (I believe) Trump did that was:
At that point, there was no longer any serious danger that Trump
would not win the plurality of GOP delegates. The main danger
was that he would fail to win a majority, and then all
the anti-Trump delegates might unite to nominate
somebody else to save us from Trump. (There were, in fact, attempts
to organize exactly that, one of the ringleaders being the previous
GOP nominee Mitt Romney.) If Cruz came in a strong second behind Trump,
then it would be difficult for that conspiracy to justify
choosing anybody besides Cruz; and as Trump well knew, the Republican Establishment
detested Cruz.

The second thing I did not see coming was the Trump sex-assault/videotape scandal.
Fortunately for Trump, Hillary Clinton and the DNC had countervailing email scandals
(which everybody did know was looming – Sanders had declined to exploit
it during the primary, but obviously the Republicans and FBI were not likely to
be that chivalrous) which happened to get
re-emphasized by the media during the 2 weeks immediately preceding the election.

Numerous polls in the timespan leading up to the election usually had
Clinton ahead of Trump, and consequently poll-aggregators such
as HuffPost Pollster and
RealClearPolitics.com
predicted (correctly) that Clinton would win the national popular vote, by
(respectively) 5.3% and 3.3% margins.
Actually, she won by a 2% margin.
Given that these two aggregators differed by 2, one might
expect each of their predictions to exhibit standard error
of about ±2, in which case the actual margin was not
outrageously off target.

But the electoral vote was what officially mattered, and
that is less trivial to predict – statewide, not nationwide, polls are
needed, and the individual state-predictions need to
be combined, e.g. using "Monte Carlo" computerized methodology.
The well known prediction agency "five-thirty-eight" run by
statistician Nate Silver thus predicted (the day before the election)
a 71.4% chance that Clinton would win, versus 28.6% chance for Trump.
Meanwhile the PredictWise "prediction market" forecast 89% chance for Clinton.
In view of that, it perhaps was a "surprise" that Trump won, but hardly a huge one.
The amount of surprise was comparable to: if you roll a 6-sided die,
and the result is "1" as opposed to a member of {2,3,4,5,6}.
I've performed this experiment, often with result=1, many times in my life and its
"surprise" value wore off long ago.

So I am not at all impressed by the media's expression of huge surprise.

History professor Allan J. Lichtman (American University)
in the Washington Post
on 23 September 2016, publicly
predicted
Trump would win the presidency. This was based on 13
particular yes/no
questions, which he called for short, the "keys."
The 13 keys were devised by Lichtman
in collaboration with Russian scientist Volodia Keilis-Borok in 1981.
To use them, you simply answer the 13 questions, and
if more than half the keys are true, then the incumbent party is predicted to
retain power, while if more than half are false, the challenging party
will win the White House.
Lichtman told the Washington Post that this method had successfully predicted all
8 presidential elections between 1983 and 2013 – and now with 2016
added, that makes 9.

The interesting thing about Lichtman's "13 keys" method is that his 13
questions only concern the historical circumstances surrounding the election, not
the election itself. It, roughly speaking,
does not care who the candidates are, what they say,
and what their poll numbers are. For that reason it often is possible to produce
their prediction years ahead of time. In particular: if the Republican nominee
had not been "Donald Trump," but rather "Porky the Pig" –
and Porky was polling only 1% – Lichtman's prediction would remain unaffected!

As an perhaps-unspoken
corollary, Lichtman is telling us that voters are complete morons!
They are wholy predictable robots.
They do not even look at what the candidates
are saying, what they will do once elected,
what their records are, etc. They simply mindlessly
choose the party appropriate for that historical moment, and elect its nominee.

More precisely: some voters might not be morons. But
that is irrelevant – the
same election results arise, as if they all were.

But before you get too enthralled with the Lichtman "13 keys" method, we
must warn you that there are three reasons
things are less rosy for Lichtman than we just
made it sound. First, many of his keys are not
completely objective yes/no questions.
They depend on evaluations of such subjective words as
"serious,"
"significant,"
"economic recession,"
"charismatic," "hero," "failure," "scandal," "major changes,"
"sustained social unrest,"
and "success."
That leaves Lichtman a lot of "wiggle room"
to use to pretend his predictions were "successful."
And indeed, Nate Silver attempted in 2011 to redo the Lichtman-keys
calculations independently himself, using his own subjective judgments
where necessary – with his conclusion being
that they actually mispredicted the 1992
election. Silver also disagreed with Lichtman about a couple of
other "keys" predictions during 1860-1980, and guesstimates that the method
really will be about 80% accurate.

Second, since his system predicted Gore would win in 2000 –
oops, actually Bush did – Lichtman then qualified by saying his predictions
pertained to the popular vote winner (who was Gore)
not the official (electoral-vote-based) winner. The trouble with that is,
in 2016, Hillary Clinton was the popular-vote winner, while Trump won only
due to the machinations of the electoral college. Oops again.

Finally third, and probably most importantly,
let me express a certain amount of skepticism re voodoo.
Specifically,
here is how to pretend to be a presidential-prediction genius.
Begin by constructing a set of 10
binary questions whose answers seem coin-toss-like,
i.e. essentially totally random and independent, although actually wholy
deterministic.

Examples:

Did the challenging-party's candidate (when young) have brown hair?

Does he fart more than the median person?

Was he born on an odd-numbered day of the year?

Is his eye-color blue/hazel, or other?

Toenails longer than median person?

Is the moon brighter than median?

You get the idea.

Note, unlike Lichtman, my questions are totally objective – I'm not going to
(in cowardly fashion) allow any "wiggle room"! Also, I'm not going
to weasel about "popular vote"; I'm going to predict the official winner!
And all my questions are going to be completely unrelated to history,
voter thinking, polls, candidate statements, etc,
i.e. my model's voters truly, beyond any shadow of a doubt,
are effectively total moron-robots.
And to put the icing on the cake, I am not going to need 13 questions. I'm only going
to need 5, because I'm way more of a genius than Lichtman – i.e. my questions are
way more insightful than his, in some deep mysterious way not at all apparent
to anybody reading them.

Theorem:
Among 10 such questions, it is likely that there exists a
5-element subset of them, and a labeling of each of
their answers as "positive" or
"negative," such that the presidency, the last 9 times in a row, was predicted
correctly every time, by "were the majority among the 5 question-answers positive?"
(And if such a test exists, then
one can find it, i.e.
find which subset and which labeling, by computer exploration
of all possibilities.)

Proof:
The number of 5-element question-subsets is 10!/5!2=252.
The number of ways to sign-label those 5 questions is 25=32.
So, in all, the computer explores 252×32=8064 possible tests.
Each possible test has a 2-9=1/512 chance of successfully predicting
all 9 binary-choice presidencies in a row.
So therefore the expected number of 100%-successful tests is 8064/512=15.75.
With almost 16 working tests expected to be found by my computer,
it is likely that ≥1 exists.
Q.E.D.

Actually, the use of the undefined word "likely" means our
"theorem" is not really a theorem. Real
theorems must be completely unambiguous.
But we think this is good enough to make our point.

(And to make it very likely this ploy will work,
instead select the best
7-question subset among 14 such questions, not 5 from 10.)

The moral of this little math-exercise is:
Beware statistical humbug!
This sort of thing is a standard scam
for astounding the gullible with your "genius" and the "immense insight"
of your "amazing system." In reality,
it may not necessarily tell us anything useful.

I do not know the whole story of the "13 keys" method so I am
not willing to claim it necessarily is total garbage. I just recommend caution.
Also, if it really is as effective as Lichtman claims, that is a frightening thing
and seems to imply that democracy is virtually pointless.

Approval
voting (with "primary" stages eliminated by merger so just one combined election)

We want to assess who would have won the presidency if all major primary contenders
had run together in a nationwide election conducted with
approval (or score) voting. To do that, we collect polls that (1)
employed those voting systems, and (2) enquired about these candidates.
Such polls of course only happened during the "primaries."
Primary voting in different US states, took place from 1 February to 14 June 2016.
Therefore, perhaps polls during the middle of this period,
i.e. April, seem the most relevant.
The following table summarizes approval-style polls
sampling over 1000 people each (nationwide adult) taken
from February to July. The candidates are listed
in descending order of fav/unfav ratio.

As you can see, Sanders would have won the election if
approval voting had been used and the election had been held
during the primaries period.

What about Kasich, who came the closest
to Sanders in approval?
In the 12 pairwise Sanders-vs-Kasich polls compiled by
RealClearPolitics.com
during March, April, and May 2016, Sanders won 9 and Kasich 3 of them.
Kasich's largest margin of
victory was 44-41 and Sanders' largest 52-41.
Also Sanders won the final 7 among these 12.
So I think Sanders' chances would have been about 80% in a head-to-head race versus Kasich.

It is perhaps worth reiterating that both Clinton & Trump were
the least-approved major party US presidential nominees in the history
of approval-style polling. This is not a close call.

The absurdly anti-democratic nature of US primaries.
It also is worth noting that
Trump got 14.0M votes in the Republican primaries, and Clinton 16.85M
in the Democratic primaries, i.e. together 30.9 million votes.
This is 9.6% of the USA's estimated 319.9M population,
and an extremely unrepresentative 9.6% too.

Score
voting (with "primary" stages eliminated by merger so just one combined election)

NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Hart Research
poll (10-14 April 2016,
1000 Registered Voters, phone)
"Now I'm going to read you the names of several public figures,
groups or organizations, and I'd like you to rate your feelings
toward each one as very positive (4), somewhat positive (3),
neutral (2), somewhat negative (1), or very negative (0).
If you don't know the name, please just say so (X indicates don't know
or refuse).":

Candidate

0

1

2

3

4

X

mean

J.Kasich

8%

11

31

23

8

19

2.27

B.Sanders

22

14

16

24

21

3

2.08

"Ted" Cruz

30

19

21

17

9

4

1.54

H.Clinton

42

14

12

19

13

0

1.47

D.Trump

53

12

10

13

11

1

1.16

B.Obama*

27

14

13

18

28

1

2.07

Paul Ryan*

11

17

28

17

9

18

1.95

(Notes: The numeric values 43210X were not mentioned to the pollees but are
used for our average-computing purposes.
Obama and Ryan were not actually presidential candidates in 2016 and
were included purely for comparison purposes. The actual poll wording stated both names,
e.g. "Donald Trump" not "D.Trump." These same notes apply to all the
score-style polls in this section.)

For those who want a particular poll, not a (dubious?) aggregration,
one
was conducted by Suffolk University for USA Today
and is found in the rightmost column of the table above.
It is the chronologically last nationwide poll I am aware of
which asked an approval-style question for all 4 nominees.
[1000 likely voters ages≥18, live telephone interviews,
20-24 October 2016,
residing in all 50 states and the District of Columbia,
who said they intended to vote in the general election on 8 Nov.]

Johnson's F/U ratio 0.524 (claimed by HuffPost) is confirmed by a poll we spoke
previously about,
which was not part of the HuffPost aggregation.
It was conducted by the Johnson/Weld campaign on 8-9 October,
and found ratio 0.507.

As you can see, Clinton would have won with
approval voting (nationwide popular vote)
with this slate of 4 candidates on election day.
(She still would lead even if we subtracted 5 points from each of her "favorable"
percentages.)

The main reasons Clinton's lead widens with approval versus
the official plurality voting margin,
presumably are

Because of the elimination or reduction of the
"spoiler effects" from Johnson and Stein.

Because Trump-disapprovers were less likely to also-disapprove Clinton,
than Clinton-disapprovers to also-disapprove Trump.

It also is worth noting that Hillary Clinton's
low approval ratings are of recent vintage,
as we see in this graphic from Gallup:

In contrast, Trump actually appears to have gradually become less
disapproved over the 1.5 years preceding the election, moving from about 23/62
Fav/Unfav rating in early July 2015, to about 37/58 in late Nov. 2016.

Note also that every candidate, unfortunately, was
more disapproved than approved.
But oddly enough the outgoing president Barack Obama
(forbidden by the
22nd amendment
from seeking a 3rd consecutive term) enjoyed majority approval at this same time,
i.e. would have won re-election by landslide (if that were legal
and he'd been added to
this slate of candidates; see bottom row of table, shaded blue).
Indeed, at the end of his second term,
Obama enjoyed 55/41 fav/unfav rating.

Also note, that Clinton's approval lead that we have assessed
was on election day 8 Nov.
In contrast, in mid-September, the same methodologies concluded that
Johnson
led approval-style polling.

Here are the results of a
Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald nationwide poll
conducted by RKM Research, 31 August to 4 September, 2016.
The survey is based on responses from
1025 randomly selected likely voters via
interviews conducted by landline and cellular
telephone. The scale is
VU=very unfavorable=0,
SU=somewhat unfavorable=1,
SF=somewhat favorable=2,
VF=somewhat favorable=3,
with the numbers {0,1,2,3} not told to the pollees but
used by us to compute average scores.
The table entries say the percentage of respondents who chose each score for
the candidate in that row. (Row sums less than 100 because
of "don't know" responses, not shown.)
Besides the 4 candidates, they also included in their poll
Bernie Sanders (whose run ended after his defeat by Clinton
in the Democratic party primary),
Elizabeth Warren (who never ran, but had often been mentioned
as a possible Dem-party contender) and Bill Weld (who
also did not run for President
but was Johnson's vice presidential running mate).
Their table lines are shaded green and blue.

Candidate

VU

SU

SF

VF

average

Bernie Sanders(D*)

24

14

26

28

1.63

Elizabeth Warren(Dx)

22

10

17

25

1.61

Gary Johnson(L)

3

9

10

4

1.58

Bill Weld(Lx)

2

5

9

1

1.53

Jill Stein(G)

3

6

7

2

1.44

Hillary R. Clinton(D)

44

9

21

21

1.20

Donald J. Trump(R)

50

9

16

21

1.08

As you can see, if these candidates had run using score voting at that time
(slightly over 2 months before election day),
then Sanders would have won,
with Trump finishing in last place;
and Johnson would have been the winner among those actually
still running at the time.

Independent confirmation of Johnson's victory
(and of the ordering of everybody besides Stein) is
provided by a nationwide
poll by Quinnipiac
University on 8-13 September 2016,
among 960 likely voters
using interviews on both land lines and cell phones
and speaking in either English or Spanish
dependent on respondent preference. Here are the Quinnipiac results:

Candidate

VU

SU

SF

VF

average

Gary Johnson(L)

15

12

14

6

1.23

Hillary R. Clinton(D)

51

6

14

26

1.15

Donald J. Trump(R)

53

6

13

22

1.04

Jill Stein(G)

13

5

5

3

0.92

But next is a poll
by Selzer & Co. for Bloomberg News, conducted
21-24 September among
1326 general population contacts ages≥18 (landline and cellphone interviews)
of whom only the 1002 "likeliest voters" were used.
Note that now, things have changed; Trump rose and Johnson sunk.
However, all three of {Trump, Clinton, Johnson} really are tied in
the sense that their differences lie within the
statistical margin of error.

Candidate

VU

SU

SF

VF

average

Barack Obama(D*)

34

13

20

31

1.49

Paul Ryan(R*)

17

28

32

11

1.42

Donald J. Trump(R)

43

12

21

22

1.22

Hillary R. Clinton(D)

41

15

24

18

1.19

Gary Johnson(L)

17

23

21

3

1.16

Jill Stein(G)

19

19

13

3

1.00

You may object that polls held in September were too early.
Fortunately for you, the
FPU/Boston Herald/RKM nationwide poll
was redone
on 1-5 November (1009 random likely voters nationwide;
landline & cellphone), and it turns out the "too early"
criticism indeed carries weight, because
during the two months
between these two FPU/BH/RKM polls,
things changed!
Most prominently, Johnson's unfavorables rose.
Here are this poll's results:

Candidate

VU

SU

SF

VF

average

Donald J. Trump(R)

47.2

8.0

16.3

27.2

1.24

Hillary R. Clinton(D)

47.4

8.7

17.5

24.9

1.20

Jill Stein(G)

12.9

15.8

9.1

2.5

1.03

Gary Johnson(L)

18.1

18.7

14.4

1.8

1.00

Incredibly, the ordering-by-average-score
of the 4 candidates has reversed
versus the earlier Aug-Sept poll by the same pollster using the same methodology!
(And although Trump "won" this poll, actually both he and Clinton
are co-winners in the sense that their difference lies within its
statistical margin of error. Also note, this poll's ordering is confirmed,
except for Stein, by the preceding Bloomberg/Selzer poll.)

Finally, a post-election
poll (10-14 Nov. 2016, interviewed
1254 registered voters aged over 18 who said they had voted, telephone both
landline and cell)
by Pew Research Institute
asked voters to "grade" the candidates A,B,C,D,F.
Only 30% gave Trump either an A or B,
the lowest percentage among winning
candidates in every US presidential election 1988-2016,
and also lowest – but tied with G.H.W.Bush in 1992
– among second-place candidates in those years.
(Note, 43% gave Clinton an A or B, and a higher average,
marking the only time 1988-2016
that the loser actually outperformed the winner on Pew's grading question.)

During the primaries, there were many "pairwise polls" attempting to assess
who would win, X or Y, in a head-to-head X-versus-Y race. (For almost
all of them, X was a Democrat and Y a Republican.)
These polls indicated that in a Clinton-versus-Y race,
or Sanders-versus-Y race,
Trump was one of the worst possible choices for the Republican Y,
i.e. one of the least likely to win that pairwise battle.
They also indicated that in a X-versus-Trump race, Sanders clearly
outperformed Clinton. There also was a round-robin poll
by GfK for the Center for Election Science (sample>1000)
indicating Sanders actually would have defeated every one of 8
rivals pairwise. (Unfortunately the 8 "rivals" they
assessed did not include John Kasich,
but did include Michael Bloomberg,
who decided not to run. But when we found 12 other pairwise
Sanders-Kasich polls ourselves
they suggested Sanders would
have won that pairing too):

So the Democrats were suicidally stupid to nominate Clinton, who lost,
as opposed to Sanders, who would have won. Meaning they were suicidally stupid
to

Usually demand only registered Democrats vote in their primary,
refusing to permit either Independents and Other-Party members to vote;

Even in "open primary" states, or states where Independents were legally permitted
to vote in the Democratic primary, the Democratic party (in at least some cases)
corruptly discouraged this and tried to keep it quiet.

Because: if the Democrats had instead employed
approval or
score voting for their
primaries, and permitted Independents to vote in them
(or merely the latter alone),
then Sanders would have won their nomination, and then the Presidency.
And further, this also
would cause the Democrats to nominate candidates more likely to win
the presidency, every time, not just in 2016.

Also: The Democratic nomination hinged on the "superdelegates,"
who were non-democratically chosen. Almost all superdelegates chose Clinton. If,
instead, almost all had chosen Sanders, then it is a mathematical fact
that he would have been nominated, and then a
polls-and-election-results-based
fact that he thereupon would have won the presidency.
The latter is essentially certain based on the gap between Clinton and Sanders in
X-versus-Trump pairwise polls, versus the small official
Trump-Clinton margins in
the three crucial states of MI, WI, and PA.

The Sanders team had in fact pointed out
the X-versus-Trump pairwise poll evidence in an unsuccessful attempt to
get the superdelegates to switch. And Sanders was entirely correct in
this argument. The reason he failed to convince the superdelegates of this
convincing and correct argument was presumably that the superdelegate system
is massively corrupt – based on political favors, money transfers,
and influence peddling, and not on poll-based realities about what is
best for the Party (which is the alleged raison d'etre for the superdelegate system).
Clinton had had 20 years as a top Democrat to suck up to superdelegates.
But Sanders had only become a Democrat (previously Independent)
for his 2016 presidential run,
and therefore could not compete in this sleaze-battle.

Pair

Result

Sanders vs Trump

In the 21 pairwise polls compiled by
RealClearPolitics.com
during March, April, and May 2016, Sanders won them all.
His smallest margin of victory was 46-42 and his largest 58-34.

Clinton vs Trump

In the 59 pairwise polls compiled by
RealClearPolitics.com
during March, April, May, and June 2016, Clinton won 52 and Trump 6 of them, with 1 tie.
Trump's largest margin of
victory was 42-37 and Clinton's largest 54-36.
[These results would seem, a priori,
to give Trump about 11% chance to win this pairing.]

Dustin Woodard, an analytics expert who played a major part in
the discovery of the Reuters poll trend, told Al Jazeera that a
significant reason for Sanders' advantage was due to disproportional
support from independent voters...
Independents are the largest voting population in the US.
Gallup reports that independents are 42 percent of the voting population,
while Democrats are only 29 percent and Republicans 26."

In New Hampshire, for instance, Sanders won Democrats by 4
percentage points while winning independents by nearly 50...
in Ohio,
Sanders won 66 percent of independents but just 35 percent
of Democrats...
[this is] a split we've seen repeatedly since then.

Results from the exit polls conducted in 27 states through the
nominating contest so far show that Hillary Clinton has
established a huge lead over Sanders among voters who self-identify
as Democrats. Sanders, though trailing in the popular vote and
delegate count, has remained competitive only because he has
built a virtually identical lead among primary voters who
self-identify as independents.
This pattern has persisted across all regions of the country...

Support among both Democrats and Independents (and everybody else)
is what matters both for benefitting the country,
and also for the chances of winning the general election.
Our point is that
Sanders was preferred within this combined set because Independents
outnumbered Registered Democrats; and the Democratic party was,
in this election, suicidally stupid
to try to discourage/stop Independents from voting in their primaries.

Meanwhile, the Republicans
were suicidally stupid to nominate Trump, who had among the worst chances
versus Democrat X, as opposed to almost anybody else, who had better chances.
Trump won that nomination solely due to the
fame-based failure pathology of plurality voting,
which made the Republicans look like utter jackasses once again. They would
have avoided this problem with approval or score voting. Then Trump would
not have won their nomination. And this
would give the Republicans better chances to win the presidency
not just in 2016, but every time.

Pair

Result

Clinton vs Kasich

In the 15 pairwise polls compiled by
RealClearPolitics.com
during March, April, and May 2016 (were none in June), Kasich won them all.
His smallest margin of
victory was 45-41 and his largest 51-39.

Clinton vs Trump

In the 59 pairwise polls compiled by
RealClearPolitics.com
during March, April, May, and June 2016, Clinton won 52 and Trump 6 of them, plus 1 tie.
Trump's largest margin of
victory was 42-37 and Clinton's largest 54-36.

Incidentally, there are also were pairwise polls concerning only Republican primary
candidates, asked only of Republican primary voters:

Pair

Polls

Cruz:Trump

NBC/WSJ(Feb): 56:40.
NBC/WSJ(Mar): 57:40.
ABC/WP(Mar): 54:41.

Rubio:Trump

NBC/WSJ(Feb): 57:41.
NBC/WSJ(Mar): 56:43.
ABC/WP(Mar): 51:45.

Kasich:Trump

NBC/WSJ(Feb): 44:52.
NBC/WSJ(Mar): 57:40.

Polls:NBC/WSJ: NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted by Hart Research Associates and Public
Opinion Strategies. Dates 14-16 Feb 2016 (400 sampled), and 3-6 March (397 sampled).
ABC/WP: ABC News/Washington Post Poll 3-6 March 2016, asked of
400 registered voters nationwide who are Republicans or lean Republican:
"What if the choice was just between Trump and Cruz? Who would you like to
see win?" If unsure: "Who do you lean toward?"
The two numbers sum to less than 100, such as 57+40=97, because of "don't know" voters.

These polls make it clear that Trump indeed won the Republican nomination solely
as the result of the
"fame-based failure" pathology of plurality voting
–
i.e, his rivals split the vote. If pitted against any of these three rivals
head-to-head, Trump would have lost.
(The only poll disagreeing with this conclusion is the italicized Kasich:Trump
poll in February, won by Trump; but it is outweighed by the March re-poll with larger
and opposed conclusion.)

In case you were wondering, the Democratic primary also was severely
distorted by its plurality-style voting. Consider Martin O'Malley,
the only life-long Democrat in the Democratic field (and past chair
of the "Democratic Leadership Council"). He was mayor
of Baltimore, two-term governor of Maryland,
and notched several progressive achievements, including
passing legislation legalizing same-sex marriage and outlawing the death penalty.
Why was all that only worth about 1% in national polls, causing O'Malley to drop
out of the Democratic race in frustration after getting 1% in
the Iowa Caucuses on 1 Feb?
Obviously, this again was a huge distortion caused purely by "must vote for one
of the top 2 leaders" strategic imperatives with
plurality voting (the "top two most-likely-to-win"
rapidly coalesced as being Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton)
and had little to do with O'Malley's true level of support.

Finally, the Green party actually came out with
videos
supporting
instant runoff voting as the cure for the USA's ills.
That was yet another suicidally stupid move.

Why? Because in this particular election there is no question
whatever that IRV would not have altered the election result.
And more generally, IRV would not
get rid of the USA's
2-party domination that has prevented the Green party from
ever winning even a single federal seat ever.
The Australian Green party actually did have one of its
members win a federal House seat in Australia via
a standard IRV election (Australia elects its House with IRV).
I repeat, one. His name is Adam Bandt. He was
the only third-party member ever to win an Australian House seat
in a standard IRV election during 1950-2015.
This perhaps is why the Australian Green Party calls for the
abolition of IRV for electing its House.
And why the Australian public as a whole (in polls) keeps saying
they would abolish IRV for electing its House,
if given the chance in a referendum.

The USA Greens, were they not this awe-inspiringly stupid,
would advocate score or approval voting.

These smug pilots have lost touch with
ordinary passengers like us. Who thinks
I should fly the plane?
–
Caption of New Yorker cartoon showing an
outraged passenger on an airplane drumming up support.

Plurality voting:
Clinton won the nationwide popular vote by about 2% over Trump.
But Trump won the presidency thanks to the "electoral college."

In the below considerations about non-plurality voting systems,
we will speak only of popular vote – except that in the case of IRV
what we say is true regardless of whether electoral or popular is used.

Score voting (restricted to the four final party-nominees
Clinton, Trump, Johnson, and Stein only):
The outcome is very unclear.
All three – Clinton, Trump and Johnson –
led, depending what time the poll was taken during the final 2 months
(plus the 1 week immediately after election day)
and perhaps Stein also could have won.
However, it appears any one of

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Paul Ryan

(listed in approximately descending order) would have (if they too had run)
easily defeated all four of these.

Approval voting (restricted to those four):
Hillary Clinton wins.
But again
if Obama had been allowed to run
(or if Sanders or Kasich had continued to run),
either would again have easily defeated all four.
Also Johnson led back in mid-September, as opposed to on
election day.

Instant Runoff voting (restricted to those four):
The electoral and popular
results would have been the same as with
the official plurality-based system(s).

Incidentally, the CES/GfK
poll
found that instant runoff exhibited a
7.7%
"favorite betrayal" rate, i.e. 7.7% of their sample of over 1000 (polled
about a 9-candidate field) said that they, if using
instant runoff voting, would have chosen to dishonestly rank their
true favorite below top. This actually was a greater
favorite-betrayal rate than the
7.3% that this same poll
found for plain-plurality voting, contradicting common
claims by IRV-proponents (those claims unfortunately are
usually made with zero supporting evidence)
that IRV would cause greater voter honesty and
less strategic lying than plain plurality voting.

Approval Voting (all primary contenders, all parties):
Sanders would have won, with Kasich second.
Oddly(?) enough, these also were the two candidates with the
greatest truthfulness percentages according
to fact-checking agencies; and also Kasich would seem to have
been the most-qualified Republican.

Score Voting (all primary contenders, all parties):
Either Sanders or Kasich would have won.

Instant Runoff Voting (all primary contenders, all parties):
It would have been utterly absurd to try to get voters to rank-order about 25 candidates.
For this reason, no reputable pollster conducted an IRV-style poll
(and probably none ever will in any comparable circumstance).
There were, however, a few "second choice" polls and based on them we can
try, somewhat dubiously,
to estimate the IRV winner; e.g. probably the Republican nominee with
IRV would have been either Walker or Trump, and the Democrat still
would have been Clinton.

Suicidal Idiocy Tally:
Both the Democratic and Republican parties were foolish
to use the voting systems they did, since each would have assured winning
the presidency by switching their primary to use approval voting
with Independents allowed to vote too.
The Green party foolishly advocated Instant Runoff Voting which
would not have altered the winner and would
not help US third parties; but with score voting Gary Johnson
actually might have won the 2016 presidency.

Partial Damage Tally:
Trump was (simultaneously) the uniquely least qualified, lyingest,
most financially interest-conflicted, oldest,
most insanely litigious,
most divorced, least-approved,
most newspaper-opposed, and most-massively-bankrupt
US president in the history of record keeping for each of
these categories.
He promised he'd militarily force one of the largest migrations in human history.
And over 20 women publicly accused him of sexual assault.